SOCIAL MEDIA
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Threads Gains Momentum as Users Reach 200M
Zuck wasn’t lying about Threads’ growth momentum. As flagged by Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg in yesterday’s Q2 earnings call, Threads is now up to 200 million monthly active users, as confirmed today by Threads chief Adam Mosseeri. Which means that Threads has taken just over a year to reach this key milestone. Which many, of course, will dismiss, because it’s…
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Meta Increases Users and Revenue in Q2
AI is a focus once again in Meta’s Q2 earnings announcement, which has seen the company post solid increases in both users and revenue in the period. First off, on users, Meta’s “Family Daily Active People” increased to 3.27 billion in Q2, up 7% year-over-year. As you can see in this graph, Meta added 30 million more users across its…
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LinkedIn Reports Higher Revenue and ‘Record Levels’ of Engagement
Microsoft has published its latest performance numbers, which also incorporate LinkedIn data. And guess what? LinkedIn saw “record engagement” once again in the period. As you can see in this overview, LinkedIn revenue rose 10% in the most recent quarter, with solid performance across all business units, while LinkedIn sessions increased 13% with “record engagement”. Which LinkedIn always reports. It’s…
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X Has Added a New Setting to Opt Out of it Using Your Data to Train Grok
Okay, this probably comes as no real surprise, seeing as though it’s actually a key selling point of the offering. But last week, X quietly added a new, explicit setting within your account options that gives X permission to use your posts and activity in the app to train its Grok AI chatbot. As explained here, X has now opted…
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New Data Suggests that X is Still Far From Profitability
While X’s owner and CEO continuously promote claims of surging popularity, and “record high” usage of the app, it seems that the transition to X has not been a financial winner for the platform, and may still spell the end for Elon Musk’s social media experiment. Over the weekend, The New York Times published a new overview of X CEO…
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Reddit Cuts Off Search Engine Scrapers, Including Bing
This is interesting. This week, Reddit mas moved to block search engines not named Google from crawling its site, via an update to its robot.txt file which blocks their crawlers. Microsoft’s Bing has now stopped crawling Reddit, after an update to the platform’s robots.txt file on July 1st, which essentially refuses access to all non-approved search engines, meaning that Reddit…
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Reddit Launches Lead Generation Ads
Reddit has launched its own version of Lead Gen Ads, which will enable marketers to gather prospective customer info direct from their promotions in the app. As you can see in this example, Reddit’s Lead Gen Ads function pretty much as you would expect. The ads include a “Sign Up” CTA (or similar), which, when clicked, takes the user through…
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X is Testing an Option to Block Links in Your Post Replies
X really doesn’t want its users to click on referral links, and head away from its site, which is why it’s already downgraded the reach of posts with links, changed the way that link previews are displayed in stream, and added native long-form posting options as a replacement. And now, it’s testing out another way to disincentivize links, though this…
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Google Abandons Plan to Phase Out Tracking Cookies
Well, after all that, after years of telling us that cookie tracking is going away, and that marketers need to brace themselves for the next big shift, Google has now announced that it won’t actually be retiring cookies after all. The years-long back and forth, which has seen Google delay the cookie phase out several times, due to various challenges…
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Meta Suspends AI Development in EU and Brazil Over Data Usage Concerns
Meta’s evolving generative AI push appears to have hit a snag, with the company forced to scale back its AI efforts in both the EU and Brazil due to regulatory scrutiny over how it’s utilizing user data in its process. First off, in the EU, where Meta has announced that it will withhold its multimodal models, a key element of…
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